“If Americans want to keep their gasoline-powered cars and their large refrigerators … be able to afford travel across their states and country … avoid European—and California—style energy poverty, their only hope is to convince politicians to end subsidies for renewables and all other forms of energy.”

It is common for advocates of renewable energy to complain about the subsidies given to fossil fuels. “We have heard testimony,” stated U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, “about the threat climate change poses to entire sectors of our economy.”

So, what are we, the federal government, doing to protect against these threats?  Actually, we are subsidizing the danger.  As we’ll hear today, the United States subsidizes the fossil fuel industry with taxpayer dollars.

Joining Sen. Whitehouse in this vein are groups like the International Monetary Fund, The Future is Electric, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.…

“Alaska’s Comprehensive Sustainable Energy Action Plan is a kleptocracy plan. The people behind this are taking advantage of decades of hard work of Alaskans who can no longer believe that wise, ethical, logical, civic minded people are at the helm (they are not). We the people must speak up.”

It is formally called “Meeting the requirements of the Priority Climate Action Plan for EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grant Program,” and Alaska’s slim green lobby is winning at the expense of the state’s indigenous resources and natural wealth. A bright light on this alien takeover can stop the takeover, however.

Background

Life is full of letdowns for conservatives in Alaska under the concerted efforts of Governor Dunleavy. Honoring a promise to abide by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Alaska Standard), his administration submitted the State of Alaska’s Priority Sustainable Energy Action Plan (PSEAP) plan to the EPA in March of 2024. This…

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 covers federal energy policy in some detail. The agenda is largely free market, and the subtle politicization of means and ends under the Biden/Harris Administration is identified for reform.

This document is congruent with the very brief Republican Party energy platform, “Make America the Dominant Energy Producer in the World, by Far”. But it falls short of true classical liberalism, as exemplified by my general approach to free market energy; the call by the Cato Institute to “zero out” the U.S. Department of Energy (2011); and end all preferential energy taxation (in 2013); and IER’s American Energy Act (2011).

The energy sections of Project 2025 follow verbatim. I offer a final comment on some of the missing initiatives.

A conservative President must be committed to unleashing all of America’s energy resources and making the energy economy serve the American people, not special interests.…

“Federal subsidies to support renewable energy formed nearly half of all federal energy-related support between fiscal years 2016 and 2022. Traditional fuels (coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear) received just 15 percent of all subsidies between FY 2016 and FY 2022, while renewables, conservation and end use received a whopping 85 percent.” (Mary Hutzler, below)

A fallacious argument in the energy/climate debate is that wind and solar are cheaper than fossil fuels in electric generation. It must be wrong because government subsidies are front-and-center for on-grid dilute, intermittent energies. And it is wrong if the federal accounting is examined (below).

Actually, the relatively small subsidies for oil, natural gas, and coal turn negative, dramatically, when the Biden Administration anti-fossil-fuel agenda is added, 225 actions worth.

Mary Hutzler of IER (and former acting head of the DOE’s Energy Information Agency) prepared this analysis less than a year ago for the Institute for Energy Research.…